by Max Hastings
It was plain that B Company would play no further active part in the day. Nonetheless, its brief movement distracted the NVA’s attention for long enough to allow Vargas and his remaining men to pull back another two hundred yards eastwards, where they took advantage of the cover of burial mounds to receive ammunition. In the course of the night that followed, aided by artillery and illuminants they repulsed several NVA probes. The captain himself finished off one enemy soldier who kept tossing grenades even after being repeatedly hit.
Shortly before Bravo stopped, the fourth of Weise’s own rifle companies reached the battlefield, having been belatedly released by Col. Hull. Echo was commanded by Jim Livingston, a dedicated warrior from McCrae, Georgia, who had no patience with fools, fainthearts, weaklings or pot-smokers, and liked to lead training runs for which his men were weighted with flak jackets. ‘I had a very strong mother,’ he said with relish. ‘She would knock the hell out of me. I was a pretty tough guy. I really wanted to get into a scrap.’ Pfc Michael Helms said: ‘We blamed the skipper for our woes because it seemed he was always volunteering us. A lot of us figured he would win the Medal of Honor, or die trying. We used to gripe and bitch among ourselves that he would probably kill us all getting it, but he definitely had our respect.’ Weise said that Livingston gave his men ‘tough love’, adding that he was supremely ‘battle-smart’.
Livingston’s company lost several men to enemy fire on the two-mile tramp south-eastwards, including a sergeant whom everybody hated and was happy to see go. They reached An Lac after fording a deep stream by forming a chain of tall Marines with arms linked to help shorter men through the water. Livingston, according to Weise, was ‘itching to get stuck in’. The Georgian quickly fulfilled his first mission – to cover the extraction of the remains of Bravo Company, saying, ‘Those kids … had had the shit beaten out of them.’
Thus at nightfall on May Day the 2/4th Marines remained armlocked with a communist force of roughly equal strength. The NVA enjoyed the advantage of fighting from strong, prepared positions. The Americans had air support, and far more artillery, but were employing tactics that maximised the communists’ opportunities. It remains baffling that higher commanders permitted, never mind insisted upon, renewal of attacks that had already cost dreadful losses. There was never any sign that the communists intended to cross the Bo Dieu River towards Dong Ha. Yet the battalion was ordered to keep punching by senior officers who said, ‘You’ve got to keep the pressure on!’
Pressure upon whom? It remains as hard now as it was then to see the virtue in sustaining the assaults. That evening of 1 May, in both camps there was weary, intense discussion about the morrow. The NVA considered withdrawal, because it was obvious that the Marines would come again. Nonetheless, their objective was to kill Americans, and the omens for achieving this remained propitious. The 6/52nd Infantry had suffered heavily, but the 3/48th was almost unscathed. At the conclusion of the Party committee’s battlefield conference, a new joint headquarters was established to direct next day’s fighting, headed by the deputy CO of the 52nd Regiment, and deputy political officer of the 48th Regiment.
Weise brought his command group ashore and told Livingston that in the morning he must retake Daido with his own E Company and the remains of G. Their two tanks were no longer available, but the battalion was promised priority for air support. What followed on 2 May was an epic which won Livingston the Medal of Honor that he coveted, to accompany his Silver and Bronze Stars. He directed his men to fix bayonets, one of the rarest orders in modern war. Then the two companies led by himself and Vargas headed forward. At 0715, when E Company was two hundred yards short of the hamlet, the NVA opened fire. Two platoons of Echo stalled, but the third dashed through them. They overran the hamlet and drove on beyond, harrowed every yard by enemy fire.
One advancing Marine got ahead of the line and was accidentally shot in the back by a comrade, causing rounds in his bandolier to ‘cook off’. A flak jacket saved his life, but when he also took a flesh wound in the stomach from an AK-47, he bolted for the rear. Another Marine who sprinted forward crashed headlong after receiving three bullets in the leg. Pfc Marshall Serna, an inveterate pothead and cocaine-user who obtained a regular morphine supply from the corpsmen, won a Silver Star. Though some men showed courage, others did not: a corporal who helped a wounded man to the rear was not seen again. As Gunnery-Sgt. Jim Eggleston was carrying back a mortally wounded Marine he called on men huddled behind burial mounds to help him. None moved – one merely shouted, ‘We’re taking fire here!’ It was a morning of horrors: after a Marine was caught in the path of an exploding RPG, his comrades saw his severed leg cartwheel through the air.
At 0914 Livingston reported Daido secure, at a cost of ten dead and sixty wounded: ‘They hurt Echo pretty bad.’ The NVA had already begun to mortar the new US positions when Col. Hull arrived in a skimmer. The battalion must ‘maintain momentum’, said the regimental commander sternly. They should hit the next hamlet, Dinh To, within an hour. An ARVN mechanised unit on their left would mount a simultaneous assault, securing their flank. Weise suggested a different plan – commit a fresh American force further north, and drive the NVA back onto the Marines holding Daido: in other words, force the communists into the open. Hull dismissed this notion: H Company must attack. ‘Scotty’ Prescott’s seventy-five men moved out at 0955, with five hundred yards of open ground to cross. Lt. Vic Taylor wrote later: ‘The day was still, the heat intense. We had guzzled all the water we could hold … Now the sweat poured out, and uniforms were soaked. Little puffs of dust rose from the dry rice paddy at each step. The metal of weapons was almost too hot to touch. The firing had ceased. Maybe this would be easier than I expected.’
Then they found themselves surrounded by dense green foliage and banana trees, with enemies apparently everywhere, shooting from cover. In one squad all the M-16s jammed, so instead they threw grenades. In worsening confusion, men sought cover. The NVA were so close that Prescott could not demand mortar or artillery support; at 1200 he told Weise that Hotel would be overrun unless reinforced. Then he himself was hit, and found his back and legs immobilised. Crawling into a hut, he was traumatised by thoughts of a wheelchair future. Taylor assumed command and radioed Weise that he had little ammunition and casualties everywhere. Hold on, he was told, Echo is coming. Only after Prescott had been evacuated was he boundlessly relieved to find sensation returning to his legs. A bullet had hit his canteen, ricocheted against a stud on his cartridge belt, torn apart his second canteen, inflicting shock and a massive bruise, but nothing worse.
Now Livingston loped forward with his .45 ‘grease gun’, leading Echo. Col. Hull came up on the net from Regiment, demanding imperiously, how was the attack going? He urged Weise: ‘Exploit your advantage, exploit your advantage! Don’t hold back – exploit your success!’ At 1340 the communists counter-attacked in Dinh To, precipitating a murderous close-quarter melee. Livingston’s weapon jammed and he tossed it away, grabbing a rifle. Some men whose M-16s proved useless began using pistols. Even Echo’s commander, the tireless warrior, felt obliged to radio Weise, ‘We can’t stay here and get all these kids killed.’ They began to fall back, the NVA pushing hard on their rear. Livingston was everywhere at once until at 1430 he took a machine-gun round in the leg, grenade fragments in the thigh. His men were appalled to see their armour-plated leader go down: ‘I bled pretty good, and I told them to leave me. Instead a couple of black guys dragged me back.’ The captain’s fall precipitated panic: he alone had been holding the Marines together, though some cursed him for their plight. L/Cpl. Phil Cornwell said: ‘They destroyed us. There were so few of us left it was unreal. The boys were angry, and word was out that the captain was shot by one of our own troops because he had led us into a slaughter. I’m glad he got capped – by one of our own guys or the gooks, it doesn’t matter.’ E Company was shattered.
Weise told his regimental commander, ‘Colonel, we’re out of steam.’ Yet Hull remained impla
cable: ‘Weise, we have to keep the pressure on. Keep pushing.’ The promised attack by an ARVN mechanised unit on their left would divert the enemy’s attention, he said. Hull ordered the 2/4th, though now a ruined battalion, to mount a new assault on Dinh To. Golf Company must make it, supported by Foxtrot, fifty-four men in all, more than a few of them armed with AK-47s because their M-16s had failed. In an extraordinary gesture, perhaps born of desperation, Bill Weise elected to go up front with them himself. Scarcely a man at the start-line had slept for three nights: exhausted and hungry, most were deeply despondent.
The advance began quietly, but suddenly the Marines took fire from their left, where the South Vietnamese were supposed to be attacking. Weise’s operator radioed their US adviser, saying to watch where they were shooting. Then John Malnar exclaimed, ‘Hey Colonel, that’s not ARVN, it’s NVA.’ The South Vietnamese attack did not happen, for reasons never explained, but wretchedly familiar in that war – a failure at best of liaison, at worst of will. The Americans found themselves under fire from all sides. At 1505 they briefly broke into a charge, yelling and screaming. Foxtrot, on the eastern flank, reported itself pinned down and taking heavy casualties. James Butler was supposed to follow G Company and pass through, but failed to do so. He said later that he merely followed orders, but Weise said F’s commander had misunderstood them, wilfully or otherwise. The colonel’s subsequent report terminated Butler’s Marine Corps career.
At 1645 two companies of NVA counter-attacked the survivors of Golf, precipitating a panic-stricken flight by the outnumbered Americans. A Marine prodded an officer who was watching his front, saying, ‘Sir, everybody’s taking off!’ Weise and ‘Big John’ Malnar found themselves shooting it out with advancing enemy at point-blank range. A Marine said: ‘Chaos began to break out, with people shouting “Pull back! Pull back!”’ The men on either side of Jay Vargas were killed. An RPG struck Malnar as he covered the rear with a pump shotgun, destroying this lonely legend who had survived the worst that Japanese, North Korean and Chinese enemies could do to him. An AK-47 round felled Weise, whom two Marines dragged back. Lt. Judson Hilton abandoned his role as air-controller and fired an M-79 ‘Thumper’ as he crawled back up a ditch. One Marine was glimpsed fleeing naked save for jungle boots. Jay Vargas was hit three times, but continued to exercise command through the disengagement, for which he was awarded a Medal of Honor. The battalion left behind in Dinh To forty-one dead.
The NVA withdrew overnight from Daido, which another Marine battalion then occupied. The Americans, drawing up the balance sheet for three days’ fighting, claimed 537 enemy killed by infantry action and a further 268 by air and artillery. Offshore warships had fired 2,383 rounds in support of the 2/4th, artillery 5,272 rounds, together with 1,147 mortar bombs; twenty-seven air strikes had been delivered. The battalion lost eighty-one killed and 297 wounded, plus a hundred slightly wounded: half of all these casualties were incurred on the last day, 2 May. One platoon commander, who started out with forty-eight Marines, wound up with three. On 30 April the battalion had mustered 650 effectives, subsequently reinforced by a further two hundred; it finished with 150 Marines fit to fight, commanded by ‘Fritz’ Warren, almost the only unwounded officer.
The communists have never published casualty figures for Daido. American claims are not believable, but the NVA certainly had many more killed than did the 2/4th. There are veiled references in communist official histories, describing their situation on 2 May: ‘We too had suffered losses … The fighting strength of our infantry was now very limited … [The 6/52nd] had few troops left.’ Yet the resilience of the NVA emphasises the limitations of American fire- and air power against dug-in troops. Jim Livingston was impressed: ‘They wouldn’t give up. They were tough little bastards who understood cover. You put them in a bunker and they would fight to the death.’ The tactical weakness of the Americans at Daido, and in many other battles, was that they made themselves visible, vulnerable targets, while the enemy seldom did so.
The NVA claimed a victory, and distributed medals as lavishly as did the Americans. They claimed to have fought on 2 May against three Marine battalions ‘and significant elements of the US 73rd Air Cavalry Brigade’, a force which did not exist. Their account concludes: ‘The entire US battalion, which was tightly bunched, disintegrated into complete disorder as men died and were wounded in droves … In just thirty minutes the entire battalion was shattered, and more than two hundred bodies were left lying on the battlefield … The blood of the American aggressors dyed red the water of the Cua Viet … In a single afternoon almost five hundred Americans had paid for their crimes with their lives.’ Of the battalion’s ten survivors, said the communist historian, two ‘had been driven totally insane with terror’. This account merits quotation merely to illustrate how twenty-first-century Vietnam recounts the war experience. Yet infantryman Bao Ninh’s words instead emphasise the commonality of experience between his own comrades, grunts and ARVN: ‘Some are brave, some not so brave.’ North Vietnamese soldiers had a profound respect for US firepower, he said, ‘even if the Americans did not understand people’.
Half a century on, it is hard to regard Daido as anything save an act of sustained folly, a view adopted at the time by many 2/4th survivors. A twenty-two-year-old corpsman, ‘Doc’ Pittman, said: ‘It was absolutely – absolutely – ridiculous, and I always felt that somebody ought to have been hung.’ The Marines’ immediate instinct was to blame Weise, though he himself did not walk for three weeks, and returned to duty only after a year. How did his wife Ethel take it? ‘She was kind – kinder than I thought she would be.’ Justice seems to place rightful blame on Col. Milton Hull and Maj. Gen. Rathvon McClure Tompkins of 3rd Marine Division. It is understandable that on 30 April those officers sent two companies to clear the shore of the Bo Dieu, when they had little idea what enemy were present. It is extraordinary that they insisted upon continuing frontal assaults through 1 and 2 May. Weise said: ‘I don’t believe Tompkins ever realised what was going on. He seemed paralysed. On that third day when they told us to keep going, I said, “This is stupid.”’
Gen. Creighton Abrams once said to his staff: ‘I wonder if we could arrange a swap of division commanders [with the NVA] – we’d take two of theirs and give them two of ours.’ He was assured, he added, that the allied cause would not lose by the deal, and perhaps he was thinking of Tompkins. Hull afterwards claimed that the Americans at Daido had faced two NVA regiments. He described the situation on the night of 2 May in words that represent a parody of the reality: ‘After three very hard counter-attacks, 2/4th Marines had suffered some casualties but their ranks were still very well-organized and they were full of motivation and wanted to continue the attack and drive the enemy back. However I … thought it was time to give the battalion a little rest.’
The battle at Daido is barely noticed in war histories. Weise says: ‘I kind of believe the Marine Corps covered this up.’ He may be right. Some, indeed most, of what went wrong in Vietnam may justly be blamed on the politicians who started it all, and kept it going. But few American commanders covered themselves in glory, and some displayed folly of Crimean proportions – such as was shown at Daido.
2 TALKING
A week after Daido ended, on 10 May 1968 at the Hôtel Majestic in Paris a US team led by Averell Harriman met a North Vietnamese delegation headed by a middle-ranking cadre, Xuan Thuy. The communist choice of envoy should have sufficed to check the surge of euphoria which swept the international community – delusions that a peace settlement would be reached within weeks, at worst months. Though Le Duc Tho, Le Duan’s most important associate, was also present, Xuan Thuy was front man. The North Vietnamese proved willing to be seen to talk, but to no early purpose. This confused the American electorate, while on the battlefield the communists continued to seek the erosion of US and South Vietnamese strength and will: here was the twin-track policy of ‘talk–fight’. Week after week, and then month after month, the rival delegations droned
at each other in Paris. The Americans clung to an insistence that North Vietnamese troops must quit the South as part of a general withdrawal of ‘foreign’ forces, while Hanoi demanded a role for the Vietcong in a Saigon coalition government. Neither proposition being acceptable to the opposing party, three years of diplomatic sterility ensued.
Lyndon Johnson’s announcement of his withdrawal from the election race crippled US diplomacy, because it increased North Vietnam’s triumphalism, its conviction that victory was at hand, despite the parlous condition of the Vietcong. In Washington, Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin was told by his Polish counterpart that premier Pham Van Dong favoured accepting South Vietnam’s neutralisation, to halt the devastation. This was conceivably true, but wholly at odds with the unyielding posture of Le Duan and Le Duc Tho. The Russians, desperate to stop paying bills for the North’s war effort, pleaded with Hanoi to show flexibility – and were rebuffed. Dobrynin wrote: ‘In Moscow there was no less consternation than in Washington … Privately … many [Soviet] Politburo members cursed the Americans, Chinese and Vietnamese for their unwillingness to seek a compromise. Brezhnev once told me angrily that he had no wish “to sink in the swamps of Vietnam”.’
The US administration sustained its delusions that Russia could end the war if it chose, especially when the Chinese became so immersed in the domestic horrors of Mao’s Cultural Revolution that in 1969 they withdrew almost all their personnel from Vietnam. Washington repeatedly urged Moscow to accept an intermediary role. The Soviets reiterated wearily that the US must deal bilaterally with the Northerners. The Americans could not understand, wrote Dobrynin, that however much Russia wanted peace, when it faced a Chinese challenge for leadership of the socialist world it could not withdraw support from its most notable revolutionary clients. Moscow was so convinced that a presidential election victory for Hubert Humphrey would end the war that its envoys vainly implored Le Duan to give the Democratic candidate a diplomatic break. The spectre of Richard Nixon persuaded the Russians to go even further: they offered Humphrey’s campaign secret financial support, which was politely refused.
